Information vs. Evidence: How Tiny Soapbox Can Close the Gap.
Your customers need it. You need it. Management experts are calling for it.
What is it? Evidence, pure and simple. What people use to make up their minds: To see what’s working, explain what isn’t working, and avoid things that don’t help them reach their goals. A big obstacle to evidence-based management is that we tend to think of technology as a way to deliver information, not evidence. But there are practical ways to close this gap.
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How can Tiny Soapbox close the information-evidence gap? By making it easier for people
to explain the evidence.
What is evidence-based management? And who’s doing it?
Evidence-based management is a movement to improve outcomes by explicitly using the current, best evidence about what really works. The information requirements are complex, and technology could do more to support these efforts.
business management Two Stanford profs, Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, are advocates: See “Forget Going With Your Gut” and their 2006 book, “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management.” Pfeffer & Sutton sponsor the site evidence-basedmanagement.com. The blog Evidence Soup is edited by Ugly Research’s very own Tracy Allison Altman. There’s an evidence-based management page on Wikipedia. Great stuff is beind done by the Evidence-based Management Collaborative. (Also see “Is There Such a Thing as Evidence-Based Management?” by Denise Rousseau.) Other advocates include Simon Moss and Ronald Francis, who’ve written The Science of Management: Fighting Fads and Fallacies with Evidence-Based Practice.
health care Evidence-based medicine has gotten lots of attention. See “Medical Guesswork: The Health Industry Knows Little About Which Common Treatments Really Work.” The journal Implementation Science and the Center for Health Design are finding ways to boost the use of research findings in clinical practice and building design. There's a blog on Evidence-Based Nursing. Also see “The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine” (Timmermans, 2003), and the journal Evidence-Based Dentistry.
government & public policy See “A Paradigm Shift for Managers and Researchers: Evidence-based Management” from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Also “What Works? Evidence-Based Policy and Practice in Public Services” by Davies et al. (2000) and “Evidence-Based Crime Prevention” by Sherman, Farrington, et al.
education For example, see Effective School Interventions: Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Student Outcomes (2nd Ed.) by Natalie Rathvon. And Teaching Content to All: Evidence-Based Inclusive Practices in Middle and Secondary Schools by Lenz, Deshler, and Kissam.
libraries See the Journal of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice.
software design See Evidence-Based Software Engineering, and also “Evidence-Based Software Engineering for Practitioners” by Kitchenham et al., IEEE Software (Jan-Feb 2005).
Tiny Soapbox can enable evidence-based management. We can show you practical ways to make it happen. Email us at soapbox@uglyresearch.com or call (303) 618-4479.
How to reach us.
soapbox@uglyresearch.com
303.618.4479